Individual Commissioning Of Dwellings: The Private Habitant As Contractor

Property developers in the Netherlands are responsible for 83% of the housing production in the profit- and non-profit sector. At this moment the housing shortage is neutralized but there is still a quality mismatch between demand and supply on the Dutch housing market. In the traditional development process, the end user has little to no input while this need does exist among end users. A possibility to give people more say is individual or co-operative commissioning of dwellings. The Dutch cabinetís target is to allow 30% of housing production to be realized through self-build projects in the period 2005 to 2010. Individual or co-operative commissioning of dwellings can be defined more closely by ëCommissioning through which consumers or a of group consumers, organized as an entity without a profit motive, have the whole legal control, and bear the responsibility for the use of the ground, the design and construction building of the houseí. This research discusses individual commissioning of dwellings. A survey is held among 148 people to gain more insight into the specific factors and the degree of say the individual commissioner wants in the development and building of its own house. There are two groups of respondents. The first group is registered for available land (response rate 64%). The second group consists of individuals who have already built their own house (response rate 12%). The results of the survey confirm the factors that are mentioned in literature to give people more say. The respondents want say in all the factors (from a little bit to much), but the importance fluctuates. If developers want to solve the mismatch between demand and supply, they have to introduce say for the end users in their development process. This is called consumer-oriented construction. Besides this, the phenomenon of collective commissioning of dwellings is coming up in the Netherlands in which the commercial developer has no role at all anymore.